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Save Our Sounds!

The Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress has formed a liaison to save and preserve thousands of sound recordings pinpointing the history of America. There is music recorded by legendary artists of the past---rare songs that have remained on shelves unheard for decades. There are speeches of Presidents and other historical figures. There are slave narratives, cowboy songs, and man-on-the-street interviews. Recorded on thousands upon thousands of cylinders, disks, and tapes, these national treasures are rapidly deteriorating, and the sounds of history are being lost forever.

The earliest sound recordings were wax cylinders,

followed by disks,





magnetic wire,
and magnetic tape.

For over a century, folklorists and ethnographers have captured sound snapshots of America - preserving everything from Native American salutation songs to the bustling sounds of the 1950s workplace. The recordings have been kept by the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, and now they are racing to transfer the deteriorating recordings to digital media before they are lost forever.

Many of the recordings being preserved are dirty or broken and require extensive cleaning and repair. Unfortunately, many recordings have already been lost. Yet in the process of sorting through the thousands of recordings, the archivists and engineers have come upon astonishing, forgotten American treasures. Among them: Lead Belly's last sessions recorded in 1949; radio broadcasts from the bombing of Pearl Harbor; and one of the most precious American recordings - Woody Guthrie's 1944 acetate disk of his song This Land is Your Land, complete with extra verses it was thought he had never recorded.

Among some of the important sounds that need to be saved are: Authentic Native American dance, and story recordings of the 1800s; unique oral histories of the last living ex-slaves recorded for the WPA project in the 1930s; songs of Chinese, Italian, Irish, Jewish and Latino immigrants; Anglo and Mexican American cowboy songs from the 1900s, and so on. The first ever recording of We Shall Overcome from 1948 Woody Guthrie's songs, including the original This Land is Your Land; songs and stories of the Farm Workers Movement; speeches of every U.S. President since Teddy Roosevelt; speeches of Rev. Martin Luther King, jr. and other Civil Rights activists, and others.

For more information regarding the Save Our Sounds proyect, visit the following websites:

http://www.loc.gov/folklife/sos/toppage.html or http://www.loc.gov/folklife/sos/toppage.html